About Birding Quiz

Hi — I'm Jim Gray. I live in Petaluma, Sonoma County, California. I've been birding for over 10 years and it has become quite an obsession. In my professional career I've been an electronic design engineer, software engineer, and technology program manager. Birding Quiz is one of my personal projects.

Why did I create Birding Quiz?

When I first started birding I couldn't tell an American Crow from a Common Raven, or a Turkey Vulture from a Red-tailed Hawk. To help me learn the local birds I made a set of online flash cards. The flash cards were helpful, but I was only learning one variation of each bird. Common Loons, for example, are only in breeding plumage part of the year — many are female, many are juveniles, and there's lots of individual variation. What I needed was a way to see random pictures for each species to be exposed to as many variations as possible.

What is Birding Quiz?

Birding Quiz creates a visual quiz using random photos from bird lists for a geographic area you choose. The order of the birds is also randomized. Photos come from the curated Flickr group Field Guide: Birds of the World, where photos are reviewed for correct species identification.

Usage Suggestions

If you're new to bird identification, start with the shorter lists and work up to longer ones. I like to take the quiz with a field guide open so I can compare. Any good supplementary resource — book, website, or regional foldout — will accelerate your learning.

I'd love to hear from you!

Comments, new feature ideas, desired bird lists, or bug reports are all welcome. Visit the contact page.

Built with

Django 5, Python 3.12, Bootstrap 5, Nginx, Gunicorn — hosted on Digital Ocean.